Imagine the rank, pungent horror of William Friedkin’s rather foul and f*cked up horror, 1973’s original faint-inducing “The Exorcist” (excellent, but harrowing). Then recall the brutal, sometimes nasty side of Lee Daniel’s unflinching, sometimes hard-to-watch Sundance hit “Precious.” Smash them together like the sound of two skulls cracking together with a sound so excruciating it makes you shudder, and you have a very good approximation of “The Deliverance,” Daniel’s latest, a horror film and social drama, which is gnarly and features similar excessive and miserablist ‘Based on The Novel Push By Sapphire’ tendencies.
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Daniels makes all kinds of films but is generally an undaunted chronicler of the Black experience in America. With “Deliverance,” he looks at the Black experience in America, particularly hardship, struggle, and abuse, and filters it through the lens of horror. While it’s fascinating in theory, and Daniels does offer some trenchant commentary about the adversities some impoverished Black Americans stuck in the cycle of poverty endure, it’s a bit of a mean, sometimes ugly, and bruising watch—and mostly not in a good way.
Inspired by a haunting case in Gary, Indiana, in 2011 around the Ammons family, the basics remain the same—a family endures a terrifying haunting in their home, though deeply exaggerated in horrific events for dramatic effect.
“The Deliverance” begins with many “Precious” like heartbreaking qualities. Ebony Jackson (Audra Day) is a single mom for now—her estranged husband is overseas fighting in Iraq—and she’s trying to parent and rear her three children: her eldest, Nate (Caleb McLaughlin from “Stranger Things”), the middle daughter Shante (Demi Singleton) and the youngest boy Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins). But bills and overdue payments are stacking up and being ignored; Ebony struggles with alcoholism and has the Department of Child Services worker closely monitoring her for past transgressions of neglect, possible abuse, and disregard.
Ebony has Alberta (Glenn Close), her reformed trailer-trashy religious mother, who once was a horribly abusive and drug-abusing mother until she found God. Still, their relationship is strained at best, broken usually, and challenging. Ebony is trying to help out her child and grandchildren by being around to assist. Yet, she’s also monitoring her daughter closely for drug and alcohol use while enduring cancer treatment, and that causes further toxic resentment in a household that’s seemingly already poisoned. Ebony is broke, her neighborhood is unsafe, and Daniels paints a pretty bleak and desperate scenario for all the characters, which makes a demonic haunting all the worse and more cruel.
Haven’t these people suffered enough with seemingly no way out or no one to rescue them? And that’s maybe the biggest problem with “The Deliverance” as a whole. It starts out bleak, dank, and harsh, and it becomes only more unpleasant, punishing, and grim when the haunting starts.
The horror of it all is something rotting, festering in the basement as if the home wasn’t in enough disrepair, both emotionally and physically. An exterminator finds a dead cat, but it turns out what’s lurking down there is far more wicked and evil. Soon, members of Ebony’s family start to behave strangely, and then things escalate to possession and other torturous agonies. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor appears as Bernice James, a suspicious woman watching the family, but turns out to be a religious Reverand who performs exorcism-like diabolical purges. And Mo’Nique, seemingly always great in Lee Daniels films, plays Cynthia Henry, a child social worker who suspects Ebony is abusing her children, continuously interrogating and asking why her children have bruises and marks on their arms, unaware of the possessions causing self-harm.
Both supporting actresses are very good in the movie, and so is Day—and the scenes between Monique and Day where they talk “mother to mother” are fierce— but they can’t help salvage the general unpleasantness of the film. There are issues beyond the oppressive bleakness, too. While some of the horror is repulsive and dark, some of it is also wtf? revolting and sometimes even unintentionally laughable. It just goes way too far, which is par for the course for this family. And aside from the end, Daniels pushes the envelope of psychological and emotional anguish and abuse and never gives the audience much of a reprieve.
And then there’s Glenn Close, whoo boy, strap-in, who is something out of a campy trailer trash drag show: a white jezebel who wants to be black and swears like a sailor. Close looks ridiculous with nearly clownish make-up, she leers over Black men flamboyantly, and she’s just a borderline offensive piece of work that makes you wonder why Daniels didn’t have the judgment to dial her back in—both in performance and hair and make-up (she’s such a landmine, even describing her feels potentially bigoted). She’s so outlandish, she’s way worse than the white trash character she played in “Hillbilly Elegy,” and she surely must be the subject of many memes on social media by now.
While the poor, urban setting of “The Deliverance” is a little bit unique for the supernatural genre, the way the suffering and dreariness within the backdrop collides with the ghastly misery of the unrelenting horror of it all is just several steps out of bounds. Daniels clearly wants to make “The Exorcist” for Black folk and draw parallels between the unjust, unfair sorrows and pains inherent in the genre of terror and his brand of melodramatic family heartaches. But it’s a hat on a hat or one type of horror slathered on another and far too unforgiving to bear. [C]
“The Deliverance” is available now on Netflix.